


Stitches in Time

by Alinya



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: But nothing that sticks, Character Death, Gen, Multiple Timelines, Season/Series 07, temporary canon divergence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:02:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26555542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alinya/pseuds/Alinya
Summary: As Fitz begins to study the time stream he stumbles through a multiplicity of futures and lives lived.
Relationships: Deke Shaw & Jemma Simmons, Leo Fitz & Deke Shaw & Jemma Simmons, Leo Fitz & Jemma Simmons
Comments: 4
Kudos: 16





	Stitches in Time

**Author's Note:**

> A request came through a while ago for a story that placed Deke as Fitzsimmons son. I don't know if this will be quite what was expected but it was the direction my brain ran.

It’s tricky, in the beginning, to navigate the time stream. It swirls around Fitz, fourth-dimensionally speaking, neither there nor not there, and him not so much part of it as out of time. It’s enough to make sharper minds than his slip, so he latches perforce onto Simmons, onto Jemma until he gets the feel of it. This means that due to their increasing emotional proximity, in almost every permutation – it’s something like 86% of the time – this leads him also to Deke.

The other 14% of the time Deke has snapped out of existence, or died when Enoch sent them back to the past. Once, almost absurdly given that they long-ago stopped trading in the ordinary, he is struck by a car as he rucks up back in their present, intact universe, born of a unfamiliarity with the danger of the automobile. But none of these versions is right; Fitz feels that intrinsically and lets them go.

That is how he arrives in the Lighthouse – not his lighthouse but someone’s lived experience of it – the image coming greyly into focus. He realises as it settles and solidifies that he is seeing the aftermath of what another him has done to Daisy. It makes Fitz more than slightly ill to think that of all the things with statistically high probabilities, this one, awful thing is practically a certainty. _He was saving the world_ , says a voice in Fitz’s inner ear, but it’s cold comfort when he’s looking at this iteration of Jemma sobbing and Deke’s clumsy effort to comfort her. Had he known this had happened, Fitz wondered? He thinks in his timeline, the original one, it is how Jemma found out he was their grandson. That she explained it in a less cagey moment between crises. So he is properly thrown when this time Jemma demands how Deke should know all the finer details of their lives, and Deke breaks the pattern.

‘Because,’ he says, ‘you used to tell me about it all the time. Before.’

‘That makes no sense,’ says Jemma, as certainty begins to coil like lead in Fitz’s stomach.

‘Don’t you get it?’ Deke says, ‘I’m your – ’

‘Grandson?’ says Jemma incredulous, and Deke shakes his head. The leaden feeling in Fitz’s gut intensifies.

‘Son,’ says Deke.

Now it’s Jemma who shakes her head. Her nose scrunches as she frowns. ‘The math’s all wrong, Deke,’ she says. ‘It makes no sense.’

 _Oh but it does,_ Fitz thinks, but only because he can see the end, can see the beginning and the roots of how in this timeline the generational tree developed more knots than a whole coppice of oaks.

He slips ahead, mesmerised by the askewness of this version of events.The jump in continuity leads to a familial squabble – the whole team, not their particular triad. They’re arguing over Coulson, who’s actively dying. Fitz can tell from the way the older man half-leans against the wall. Knows it from the smell of sleeplessness and stress that adheres to all of them.

Yoyo is saying, ‘You aren’t _listening,_ ’ and visibly crackling with frustration. Even out of time like this Fitz half expects sparks to fly from her mechanical arms. Several people scrabble to talk at once; Jemma is conciliatory, Daisy is spitting like a cat, May’s tether has frayed with grief and negotiating the peace.

For some unfathomable reason, Deke breaks through this clamour to say ‘It’s not their fault. None of them gets it.’

‘And you do?’ says a version of Daisy every bit as sceptical as this timeline’s version of Fitz looks.

‘Yeah,’ says Deke. ‘Yeah I do. Because I’ve lived it too, okay? The dying and coming back, over and over and _over._ It’s horrible, and it hurts. And none of them – not one of you – ever stops it!’

He sounds suddenly, painfully young. Pins, were they dropped, would be audible. Instead there is only the low hum of Control, and the cool, prickly smell of steal and spent anger. Even out of time Fitz feels it and wishes the experience were more like staring at an oil painting and less like being submerged in a living, breathing novel. No wonder Jemma had worried he might go mad, it’s that bloody real.

‘Of course,’ says this Jemma, her dentals crisp and polished, ‘it makes sense now.’ Even here, in this confused timeline, her accent succeeds at shooting upward six degrees at least in the direction of Posh rather than relaxed South Yorkshire.

‘Thought it might,’ says Deke, but in this timeline he doesn’t go to her, and no wonder. He crosses his arms, shrugs clumsily as an afterthought and says, ‘Any thoughts on how to casually bring up that time in your future, my past when it was okay to leave me behind to work on the time machine?’

Some other version of Fitz has stumbled improbably into the peacemaker role, one hand help up to silence his son.

‘Deke,’ Simmons says, ‘We would _never_ …’

‘Well you do. Did. And every time we go through this loop, you do it again.’ And Deke stalks off, arms still crossed, to leave the rest of them to grapple with Coulson and the end of the world. No one has any insights.

The stream skips again. Fitz doesn’t really need the timestream to see that in this timeline, they don’t save the world. They are all too at odds with themselves and each other for that. The world fractures, they fall to pieces and the Zephyr skyrockets. Robin clings to May and subsequently sisters an Alya who sounds nothing like the little girl Fitz left babbling on Jemma’s knee as recently as this morning. In his present, the timeline proper, they are mapping brains while he sifts through the fourth dimension. Here, his daughter runs glad riot after Robin, speaking to her in a shared, secretive language of signs and gestures, the odd, stencilled photo. _Better or worse_ , Fitz wonders as he watches this strange, imperfectly innocent childhood unfold, _or about the same?_

Another stutter in time.

‘Can we keep him, Mama?’ asks Alya, that much taller than mere seconds ago. It’s strange to hear such an American appellation from her, and for a moment Fitz’s ears misgive him.

‘Of course we can, sweetheart,’ says Jemma.

Somehow Fitz wrenches his attention away from the pair of them to the slippery, dark-haired baby in Jemma’s arms. He looks…well, he doesn’t look like Deke, but then no baby really looks like anyone much for those first few months. How had Enoch said it when Alya was born?

‘I do not believe it is currently possible to discern her genetic origin. But in time, Best Friend, it is my suspicion she will look like you.’

Fitz shakes his head, half-laughs at the memory, which is threatening to pull him back into his own timeline. The cosmos ripples visibly with the effort to extricate him, a shiner of incandescent colours that make his eyes water. He doesn’t want to go quite yet, though. He watches as Alya scrabbles awkwardly under her mother’s arm so that she’s snuggled between mother and brother. Close enough, Fitz supposes, to smell that vernix and blood smell so particular in new babies.

‘You see,’ Jemma says to her daughter, ‘science can be really lovely.’

Alya wrinkles her nose, apparently unbelieving in this timeline. There’s a pattering of feet and Robin bobs up the other side of Jemma.

‘Is he just like I said?’ she asks.

‘He’s alive,’ says Jemma, which leads Fitz to wonder horrifyingly just what this Robin had seen as related to Deke. He decides he doesn’t want to know. May appears, ostensibly to coral Robin, but she lingers too long to credibly sustain the pretence.

‘Got a name for him?’

‘We thought,’ begins Jemma.

‘Deke,’ says the other Fitz simply. May’s eyebrows shoot up, her unspoken _Really_ beyond discernible to people who know her.

‘We miss him,’ Jemma says. ‘And we never did find out what happened to him, there at the end.’ 

May nods. There must have been other options, but it’s obvious looking at May – looking at all of them – that this was the bearable one. A way of remembering the past without regularly having to snag their souls on stray fragments of grief. It’s lovely, and sweet, and Fitz refuses to linger to see how it goes wrong. After all, it’s only a line of probability. An afterthought of a timeline. A mere cosmic shadow in the wider tapestry of spacetime.

A young Deke opens his eyes, Jemma smiles and Fitz pulls on the threads of time.

* * *

‘I built this thing,’ says Deke, indignant, ‘because _nobody liked me_.’

He says it as the time stream reforms. Fitz sees more than feels the difference; if the previous out-of-joint timeline shimmered greyly, this one is dyed sunset colours. That Deke is currently the textbook definition of what Fitz’s mum would call stroppy makes this feel that much closer to home though. But before Fitz – well, a version of him – can say so, Deke has vanished. And Fitz, observing, knows how this goes; knows that as it happens he and Jemma shout their own version of what he now understands to be a kind of familial fury brought on by love and terror roiling and boiling together. It’s the way Jemma had sounded the day Alya’s inquisitiveness lead her to pick up the timestream and brandish it like a baton. The way too, Fitz had been torn between terror and pride at the sight of Alya, underwhelmed by the prospect of naptime, trying to get a read on D.I.A,N.A. while Enoch and Jemma were elsewhere.

He watches this same complicated emotion flicker across some other Fitzsimmons as Deke teleports off to the temple, remembers all too vividly how this should play out. He is, therefore, horrified when what should happen doesn’t happen. There’s a squealing and wrenching like an unoiled door coming unjammed, or a kettle screaming itself dry, and Deke is back. Most of him. Enough of him to tell them that he’d played up the efficacy of the Shaw Drive, to realise that most of the mice had died. Deke tries to say as much but it comes out a sputtering, stuttering wrench of a sound somewhere between sob and scream. Fitz would strangle him if it were possible. The projection of himself before his mind’s eye clearly agrees. He watches as the other him settles for squeezing Deke’s shoulder while Jemma tries ineffectually to staunch the blood.

But there’s too much; her hands go scarlet and the lab on the 27th floor is full of the hot, metallic tang of blood. Improbably, adrift in spacetime, a strand of English from before his Scottish Highers springs to mind. Deke gasps in futility for air and Fitz hears the dispassionate voice of Mrs Murdoch as she recites _So much comic, so much blood_. It’s Thomas Hood, and oddly apt for the absurdity of Deke’s blood among the lemons.

Fitz doesn’t hesitate this time. He skips wilfully elsewhere.

* * *

They’re on the Zephyr. The scene settles into being in satisfying coruscation of colour. It's reminiscent of polaroids as they bleed to life, but more substantive. Fitz feels the timeline snap too, like a puzzle piece when slotted into its rightful spot, and knows instinctively this is the timeline to pay attention to. The plane hums and whirrs with comforting familiarity. Jemma and Deke in the lab, but not the lab, the new one that he and Jemma are even now designing. She and Deke are wrangling the problem of the hour, which involves the time drive and ways upon ways of calculating the jumps. Their heads are bent close and at this angle it's the easiest thing in the world to see her in him, the sweetness, light and perpetual optimism. Then Deke throws his multitool down in exasperation, and that's a Fitzian inheritance - Fitz doesn't need a looking glass to work that one out. Jemma's particular mix of patient if exhausted ' Deke!' is tell enough.

'We'll never make the drive work,' says Deke, not really to Jemma, Fitz thinks so much as to the uncaring whims of the cosmos. Fitz could tell them a thing or three about how it operates, but he’s not part of this, any more than he was of the earlier kaleidoscope options of timelines. And besides, he has, improbably, confidence in Deke. Well, he has confidence in Jemma, who has confidence in Deke so the logical extrapolation is that he too, believes in their grandson.

Fitz only partially second-guesses this belief when the timeline jutters and Fitz skips ahead. Deke has earphones on and is snapping his fingers along to something half-familiar to Fitz. He can’t hear it for following Jemma but the rhythm bespeaks 80s throwback nights in the boiler room back at the academy.

His line of sight travels easily from Deke to Jemma, with her hands tied and oily Nathanael Malick looming over her.

‘If duct tape doesn’t work,’ he is saying, and Fitz thinks idly that it’s a shame he can’t interfere from his position, merely observe. Not for the first time he understands why the Chronicoms have the advantage in interfacing with this kind of tech.

Deke bobs back into Fitz’s periphery and takes a wrench to the head of one of Nathanael’s nogoodnicks. The wrench makes a pinging noise against the jaw of its target and it doesn’t take him out properly – indeed, it gets Deke caught for his trouble. But the thing of it is that it’s all too like some of his own first clumsy efforts as a field agent to really, properly fault. And besides, he’s survived, so the odds are up from the last timeline.

‘Deke,’ Jemma says later, cupping his face in her hands, ‘are you all right?’

This Deke – their Deke – sputters indignation. ‘Me?! What about you? Are you all right?’

And they are, Fitz sees. Jemma’s forgotten him, or she will have as and when they get there, but there’s a solve for that. They’re working on it even now. Fitz doesn’t count on the last piece – the loss of Deke to whatever alternative narrative time has spun for them, but even that clicks into place, the last stubborn piece of the temporal puzzle. It hurts a bit, the way a burn from a Bunsen burner will in those first, tender moments, but impossible not to stand out of time and see it for what it is. Nature has ever hated a paradox. And Deke going forward with them, rucking up against the possibility of his younger self, well its uncomfortably like a paradox. Too much so to be left alone. So Fitz watches the goodbyes and begins plotting, in addition to the solve to Jemma’s fractious memory, the timelines and all the rest, the idyll they will spin for this next, younger, Deke. It will be good, he thinks, and mercifully will come to be in good, far-off time.


End file.
